Pike’s Peak in Colorado rises to 14,115 feet above sea level and the hike to the summit is about 13 miles long. Getting to the top is no walk in the park. Dangers include loose rock on the path, wild animals, ravines, sudden drops in temperature and when the sun goes down, the high altitude will have you sucking wind to the summit. Anybody who completes this marathon round-trip from Manitou Springs deserves respect. Now imagine performing the hike in near 100-degree heat on your hands and knees…while pushing a peanut with your nose!
That is exactly what 53-year-old, Bob Salem did last week, completing the task in a record-breaking seven days. I say “record-breaking” because, as unlikely as it sounds, he was the fourth person to push a peanut up Pike’s Peak with his proboscis. Bill Williams was the first lunatic to do it back in 1929 on a $500 bet and it took him 20 days.
To celebrate Manitou Springs’ 150th birthday and raise money for the homeless, Salem pushed his peanut up the mountain using a soup spoon duct-taped to a modified CPAP breathing machine. Because he did the climb alone, Salem was obliged to push his peanut until he couldn’t take it anymore and periodically retrace his steps to retrieve his 40-pound backpack. He went through some two dozen peanuts throughout the trip because they kept falling through cracks in the rocks. “I don’t feel sore or anything,” he gamely told Scripps Media, “But I know I lost some weight.”
For his efforts, Salem received two plaques and a little jewelry box from the City of Manitou Springs in order to display his final peanut. No medal. No parade. No handshake from the governor. No glory. That’s what you get when you’re not the first.
Pike’s Peak in Colorado is a popular tourist destination, not to be confused with Iowa’s own Pike’s Peak, near McGregor. Unknown outside of Iowa, our Pike’s Peak is a more modest 6,412 feet high but was also named after Zebulon Pike who in 1806 was sent by President Thomas Jefferson to find the source of the Mississippi River—which he never did. Pike did, however, actually climb the Iowa bluff that bears his name—which is more than he could say for the mountain in Colorado which was waist-deep in snow when he made the attempt (without, I might add, having to push a peanut with his nose).
Pike has been ridiculed for being a second-rate Lewis-and-Clark whom Jefferson had commissioned to explore the West about the same time. After floundering in the Colorado snow, Pike decided to make a dugout canoe like the Ojibwe’s. Filled with his men and supplies, the canoe immediately sank. He tried to dry out his gunpower over a fire and it promptly exploded. Pike then got his men hopelessly lost until they were captured by Spanish troops and hauled off to Santa Fe, where, presumably, they were at least warm.
Pike never received the kind of fame Lewis and Clark enjoyed and died at the age of 34, participating in a battle in Canada during the War of 1812. In retaliation for this attack, the British torched the White House, which remained safe thereafter until Donald Trump’s failed insurrection of 2021.
Posterity can be so cruel to anybody who comes in second. They can do their best but if they come up short, they fall through the cracks of history like Bob Salem’s little lost peanuts.